Election opinons

I was irritated by the election results today. My district's Congressional representative, Republican John Rice Carter, won with 82.5% of the vote. He faced no Democrat opponent -- his only challenger was Libertarian candidate Bill Oliver.

But it's not really the Republicans who irritate me so much as the even-more-right-wing Tea Party. They protest against government taxes when in fact their taxes have gone down over the past ten years -- not just with the Bush tax cuts, but also with the Obama administration's "Making Work Pay." So what are they angry about?

I convinced the Tea Party is just plain angry with how things are going. They don't like the way Wall Street got bailed out, and I don't blame them, but what alternative do they propose? Letting it collapse? The financial system is to the economy what the circulatory system is to the body. It's what gets the money flowing so that the economy can function.

To continue the metaphor, the Tea Party would, in essence, have us turn to the archaic practice of "bleeding" the patient in order to "get rid of the bad blood." It makes no sense.

In just such a fashion, that's how the Great Depression got started. The stock market crash of 1929 didn't cause it -- it was the collapse of financial institutions for systemic, not business, reasons. Without guarantees on customer's accounts, "contagion" quickly spread, spreading fear of "maybe this will happen to my bank." People and businesses didn't want to spend money, and the vicious cycle continued.

The lack of consumer confidence and destruction of money through bankruptcies caused deflation and high unemployment, and the whole country just spiraled downward. Is that really what the Tea Party wants?

So that's my the first issue. Next is their problem with what's derisively called "Obamacare," the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (Of course, no one has a problem with either being protected or having affordable health care, so mock it with the president name like in grade school. Very mature, people.)

What are they really concerned about? If everyone has insurance, people can get their own "preventative maintenance." You know the saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"? That's true here. It's way cheaper to pay for someone's annual physical than to take care of them in the emergency room.

The Tea Party talks about repealing the Act. Are they serious? 15.5% of the residents in Texas District 31 don't have health insurance -- that's almost one in six. [Source] That is simply unbefitting for our nation.

Finally, there are the nutcases who think Obama is either Muslim or a foreigner. My favorite is when people in the Army demand to see his birth certificate before they deploy, like this guy. [Source] It makes me want to say, "Let me save you some time. HERE."

Or they'll say that because he wasn't born in the United States that he's not a citizen. Uh, being born in the U.S. isn't a requirement to being a citizen. My son, for example, was born in Korea; my daughter, in Texas. Does that mean he's an illegal alien but not her?

No, because a child of mixed-citizenship parents gets U.S. citizenship if the U.S. citizen parent has lived here for at least five years. Those are the rules.

Amazingly, the number of people who think Obama is a Muslim has actually increased since he took office, to 20 percent. At the same time, the number of people who identify him as Christian has dropped from one-half to now only one-third.[Source]

It maddens me that facts don't matter to these folks, either because they don't care or because they live within their own separate realities, insulated by media and contacts who feed them misinformation.

Sadly, I think my grandfather is one of them -- I get wacky email forwards from him all the time, and it's impossible to persuade him. What, I wonder, is the best way to handle this?

Maybe I should wrap myself up in like-minded media inputs and complain on a blog.